King Sunny Adé had been making his own music since 1974 with his group the Green Spots before creating his large African Beats group. This band, despite making literally over 100 records in Nigeria, failed to stir much Western interest until Mango Records, a subsidiary of Island, took a chance and issued the breakthrough album Juju Music in 1982. With its seven extended cuts, it introduced King Sunny Adé & His African Beats to the U.S. as well as England and most of the rest of Europe – save for France, where the band had previously been able to tour. This U.K. two-fer reissue of 1983's Synchro System and Aura (on Cherry Red's T-Bird imprint) is comprised of the other two recordings in the band's Mango catalog (the band was dropped after sales of these two recordings proved disappointing to label bosses who tried to market Adé as "the new Bob Marley").

These five orchestral works, spanning Chinary Ung's (b. 1942) career between 1970 to 2013, are a departure from his early vocalisation and synthesizer experiments and his usual chamber pieces, yet they remain imbued with his Cambodian heritage. Indeed, they are filled with Asian colors with the help of Chinese, Thai, and Indian instruments.

The biggest ribbons in composer/arranger Gil Evans' (1912-1988) resume are three groundbreaking Columbia Records albums he recorded with trumpeter Miles Davis: Miles Ahead (1958); Porgy and Bess (1959); and Sketches of Spain (1960). These were orchestral jazz of the finest caliber, recorded a decade after Evans' earlier work with Davis on the seminal Capitol Records set Birth of the Cool, released in 1957. Evans' charts—written with the the inclusion of the then unusual (in jazz) French horns and the then out-of-fashion tuba—tended less toward the brassy, in-your-face, wall-of-sound horn harmonies and more toward softer shades, less primary colors, more a mixing in of diaphanous pastels and airy, floating harmonics that seemed to trail silk curtains into the sound.

Thirty-seven completed and two unfinished bassoon concertos, more than for any other instrument except the violin; Vivaldi must have had one terrific fagottista in that ospedale . Well, Sergio Azzolino is pretty good, too. FANFARE: Alan Swanson

We are a part of nature, not separate from or above it. What we do to nature, we do to ourselves. Nebula reminds us that we are Earth's caretakers and to be loving guardians of all. Danish composer and musician Henrik Hytteballe has woven the exquisite voice of Sara Grabow through the fabric of this beautiful and timely Haiku Project creation.